‘You know, Doctor,’ she said, ‘I think of my sex life – my life, period, in fact – as a series of jump cuts. A man comes in, gets all excited, has me, loses me . . . And then in the next shot you see the same man – or maybe another one – come in again, but this time his smile’s different, he’s got a new set of mannerisms, the lighting’s changed. He was holding an empty glass a minute ago and now it’s half full. We look at each other through different eyes. Time’s passed but we’re still caught up in an image we have of ourselves, we still think we’re meeting for the first time. Does that make any sense to you? I don’t know if it does me either, but I wonder whether that’s what relationships between men and women are really like. We try to touch as we pass each other but we’re not separated just by space, time is against us too.’ By this stage in her analysis, Greenson was starting to think Marilyn’s problems lay not so much in her sexuality as in a confusion in her self-image.
